I’ve gone through the whole thing and highlighted some excerpts, but I didn’t include Sabean speaking about Barry Zito’s comeback attempt with the A’s, the Giants’ budget into the future, dialogue on the market for Cuban players hitting the market… and other items.
To the excerpts…

* On the emotional and physical wear-and-tear of the whole five-year run, starting around the 4:30 mark: “I’ll speak for the group–the three World Series were stories in and of themselves.

“But ’11 and ’13 I think in general, out of the five years, took a huge toll on us. In ’11 we thought we had a chance to repeat and we lost Buster, the trade for Beltran didn’t go as planned, he got banged up and we could never score the runs we needed; that staff actually out-performed the ’10 staff during the regular season…

Billy Beane knows the Yoenis Cespedes question is coming, because it’s always looming when you talk about the A’s these days.

This is seven months after the A’s general manager controversially dealt Cespedes for pending free agent ace Jon Lester, and five months after the A’s lost the AL Wild-Card game to Kansas City with Lester on the mound.

This is spring training 2015, with a ton of new A’s faces, not July 2014, when the A’s had the best record in baseball and Cespedes in the middle of the lineup.

But to explain what they are now, Beane knows he has to go back to July 31. Actually, Beane adds, the A’s 2014 season had been eroding for a while before then.

To wrap up my mega-GM day on “The TK Show,” here’s my good conversation with Giants GM Brian Sabean, who is always patient with my questions and was absolutely forthright and fascinating in this talk today.

We talked about his emotions while Bruce Bochy had a heart issue discovered last week, about Sabean’s thoughts about the 2010, 2012 and 2014 World Series-winning seasons–and, in his mind, just as importantly about the 2011 and 2013 campaigns.

I’ve been off on the timer-count recently, but what I see now is a 33-minute conversation that felt like 10 while we were chatting about the planning and thinking behind all the recent trades, the Yoenis Cespedes-Jon Lester decision, how he deals with the stadium situation, analytics in sports and of course the English Premier League.

It’s Oakland. Other teams in other sports have other options, but for the A’s, the singular serious option is to remain in Oakland and try to get a new stadium built on the Coliseum site (or elsewhere in the city).

This is the way it is now–as reinforced by recent events–and this is the way it has been from the start of the process, probably about 2,000 years ago, it seems.

The A’s and Oakland are two less than invincible fiscal entities, but they remain each other’s best chance to get something significant done.

Everybody else has other better options, almost certainly including the Raiders, but Oakland and the A’s have each other, and not much else.

I would say that about Alex Rodriguez possibly coming to either the A’s or the Giants, even if there was strong evidence that he might still be a very good player, but there is actually no such evidence.

So, I repeat: No, I don’t see the fit with the A’s. And no, I don’t see it happening at all with the Giants, either.

Even if he was the A-Rod that you remember from SEVEN YEARS AGO (NL Cy Young winner that year: Tim Lincecum), I’d say that the A’s and Giants would be wise to be cautious about this, because why would such a good player be available?